Note: I normally don’t post things directly from my blog here except for the occasional link in a comment, cause they usually veer off topic from the main point of the sub. This post is a bit of an exception.


 

Real "freedom" is not the freedom to choose to do whatever you want ... it is the freedom to make good choices. Our feral nature is as much a cage as any other.

On an individual level, we are raising women these days who don’t seem aware of the trade-offs, who don’t seem to realize the supposed “chains” they’re railing against are, in fact, the chains of freedom. Because none of us are ever really truly free, only free-er. We all live as part of some social contract … the question is what form that contract takes. That is the price we pay for living as part of a functioning society, and all the opportunities such a society affords – there are some things we cannot do. Forbidden, outlawed, taboo, frowned upon.

Yet it is often the very same things that bind us – these Chains of Freedom – which also enable us.

A society that permits anything, that has no social contract, is not a society at all. It simply descends into a war against all, bellum omnium contra omnes. Our feral nature comes to the fore.


 

It is interesting to see this clash play out in real time. A quick way to do so is to date a lot of women in the modern West.

For example, over the last few years I’ve gone out with several Asian girls here in Chicago, whose parents were all first generation immigrants from places like China, Taiwan, and South Korea. Very Americanized ladies. I’ve also dated a couple Asian girls who grew up in those countries and came over to the United States as young adults, still seeped in their traditional upbringing.

In fact, I just went out not that long ago with one girl in Chicago whose parent came over from northern China. She grew up in DC and New York, went to college in Boston. And she was about what you would expect. Early 30’s, spent her younger years clubbing, has a few tattoos, fucked who knows how many guys at this point. And she is still living down near the Loop in Chicago, delaying giving up that Sex and the City lifestyle till she’s 40. Or maybe never, who knows.

I’ve also dated an Asian doctor in Chicago, whose parents came over from Taiwan. And despite her seemingly “put together” upstanding professional life, her personal life was a little more sordid. She had some very suggestive tattoos, and definitely a bit of a freak in the sheets.

All that to say, it is interesting to see how girls brought over as toddlers (or born here) from traditional countries with parents having those conservative Asian values – yet who grow up in our Western society – turn out so altered from their parents. So blunt. So masculine. So brusque. So sexual. So feral.

Embracing their harlot nature.

In contrast, the girls I’ve dated who grew up in Korea or China and came here later are very different. More conservative. More feminine. Much harder nuts to crack either emotionally or sexually. And some may say that would be good for an “undomesticated” man like myself, but in all truth I actually enjoy the challenge. I know how to play the game. Indeed, when I am forced to rise above my own feral nature to truly “conquer” a girl, then I am often at my best as a man. Even if, in this promiscuous era, I know that such conquest will likely not last long. She is not yours, it is just your turn.

To which I will posit this curious yet counterintuitive principle: to be free is to overcome our feral nature, not to embrace it. And in that sense, haphazardly casting off the chains which restrain us makes us no more free. Rather, it is those chains that allow us as humans to carve meaning out of a world where there is otherwise none.


 

Those Chains of Freedom have another curious side effect: they also force us to introspect more. When we must work within constraints, we are forced to take a good, long hard look at our choices. In contrast, when there are no boundaries, there is no need to question if, and why, we must cross them.

I made some similar comments on a recent post on the TRP reddit. How, from a TRP perspective, there is no going back at this point, and it is incumbent for a Red-Pilled man to understand the current cultural landscape of the West and how to navigate it ... but it is a fair question whether the trade was worth it. As well as the question of whether generations of the future should embrace the values of the Baby Boomers - diversity, androgyny, progressivism, post-modernism, etc.

There was an article in the National Review last month, written by famed Russian novelist and communist critic Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, about the reaction to the commencement speech he gave at Harvard University. During the speech, Solzhenitzyn argued that the West’s dogmatic approach to sociopolitical changes and social justice have led it blindly toward an erosion of individual freedom and meritocratic principles. And that such dogma raises an important yet rarely voiced moral question: who is it exactly we are helping?

Solzhenitzyn’s arguments echoed ones I made years ago: that in our efforts to empower the weak, we have in the end empowered no one.

They also raise the question of whether it is truly acceptable to be self-critical of certain “progressive” principles in the modern West? Concepts like diversity, androgyny, progressivism, post-modernism, etc. Or are we once again, just like the Christian hegemony of middle age Europe, caught in an invisible dogma apparent only from the outside?

We see the same principle in recent missives from the Heterodox Academy, which if you are unfamiliar with is an organization of professors, researchers, and other academics who hold “support for increasing viewpoint diversity – particularly political and ideological diversity – on university and college campuses.” Currently it has over 2000 members and rapidly growing.

The emphasis for Heterodox Academy is how do we train students and young people in self-critical thinking and rationalism in the face of such invisible dogma? Rather than just shouting down speakers or ideas they don’t like. Or more acutely, how do we continually teach each generation that dogmatic thinking is like an ocean beating against our shores, eroding the sand, with rationalism our only beachhead to hold against.

Indeed, such invisible dogma is a seductive mistress, perhaps the greatest harlot of them all. A siren of the sea.

It may be, much like stories of the Asian ladies I dated told above, that we find freedom is a thing derived from boundaries. That there is no freedom without the chains of freedom. That casting off those chains doesn’t make us more free, but less.